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Pastor Maldonado….
Simply because no matter how hard he tried to crash today, he didn’t.
Wow that was dull. I’ll vote Hulk.
Went with Hulk, he did as much as possible.
Honourable mention to Rosberg (just find it hard to vote for a Merc driver as they usually not pushed to 100%, but great job by him today), Massa (was there to take advantage of Ferrari’s problem, while Bottas was not), and finally Pastor (patient, composed – mostly, and nice catch/pass to a Max shimmy).
We its pointless voting for Lewis, the same goes for Rosberg, Gotta be Hulk, honourable mention to Massa, kept his shit together and Pastor for out Verstappening Verstappen.
Hulk. Rosberg maybe. But Hulk!
Max should really stop driving like a teenager before someone gets badly hurt.
Oh, back on topic: Hulkenberg. He did pretty well I with an almost 2014 car.
“Max should really stop driving like a teenager before someone gets badly hurt.”
Surprise me, what on earth are you talking about?
Let’s see: Monaco. Strike 1. The way he shut the door on Maldonado and then move left before going straight into the gravel? Strike 2. It would be great for al involved, including himself, to not get a 3rd strike.
I’m not saying he is not talented, but that his lack of maturity (normal for his age) and “limited” (to say the least) experience is dangerous.
I voted for Nico Rosberg, for the following reasons.
1: Nico’s weekend-long strong performance has some added value for me because it’s in the context of a championship fight.
2: Nico’s practice and qualifying performances were strong and consistent. They showed a slow build up to a sustainable and rhythmic race pace. His final Q3 lap seems to be his only mistake in the lead up to the race; however he had to ‘go for it’ as Lewis pulled out some Q3 magic and hooked up his first Q3 lap very well. Despite that first Q3 lap, it was clear Lewis once again didn’t like the track in Austria. I have a theory for this, but for another time.
3: Nico’s start was good, as has been the case since he worked on his clutch settings a few races ago. It seems to be a gift that keeps giving, however I think Lewis did have a starting issue – though I am not 100% sure.
4: Nico then didn’t exclusively rely on his start advantage and back the field up. He pulled away and built a gap prior the stops. During this phase, as Lewis would close, he’d respond comfortably. It was a one-on-one fight on pure pace and Nico had it in hand, I my opinion. .
5: During the pitstop phase, he effortlessly pumped in a fastest race lap to ensure he maintained the lead. At this stage, he extended his lead and had built about a 5 second gap, I think. At some stage soon after, I believe it blew out to about 7 seconds. Once again, Nico demonstrated his pure race performance was stronger and ensured that any battle would have to be fought on the track, to which he was winning the one-on-one fight at this relatively late stage.
6: After Lewis received the 5 second penalty, which all but sealed the race result, Nico once again didn’t back off and rely on that advantage. He continued to do his race, build/manage his lead and brought it home.
In the end, a post-race quote from Lauda was pretty accurate from my perspective. “Nico was outstanding today, he would have won it without Lewis’ penalty.”
Nico seems to have turned a corner in terms of his confidence in racing. He has now won three of the last four races, albeit the Monaco race was a fortuitous win. He is quoted as saying in the post-race interview, “I think I have found what I needed to find (from) last year…” It may be so, as he seems to have moved away from focusing on pure qualifying to thinking about race pace.
There is only 10 points in it now, again, and I am looking forward to the rest of the championship. The British GP will be intense.
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Highly commended for Nico Hulkenberg, our Le Mans king…
From what I understand, Mercedes has reverted to the 2014-spec clutch springs for ‘reliability’ reasons following a number of poor (relatively speaking) starts by Nico. HAM has said he doesn’t like the ’14 spec part as much as the ’15 spec he was getting better starts with. This is all just hearsay but sometimes it makes you wonder…
I do agree largely with your assessment though, that HAM just doesn’t really like the Austrian track. It is a deceptively simple layout and for some reason, this doesn’t suit his style nearly as much as the Tilke-dromes. Why I don’t quite know… There is probably something subtle here I’m missing, but I honestly don’t know why HAM wasn’t able to setup his car in a way that gave him a ride he could make pace with. There was talk HAM couldn’t get the tires to heat up properly, so maybe we can blame that, but if so, why didn’t his engineers get it sorted in FP?
I voted Maldonado – I seem to vote for entertainment and he did entertain! Nice manouvres and a bit of luck. He showed that he isn’t totally useless.
Hulk. Yet again a performance which seems to be better than the car is capable. Both on saturday (what an effort) and on Sunday.
Every time Danny Ricciardo muscles that dog of a car into any sort of a points position, he gets my vote.